The Europhobes in the UK who routinely complain about the Euro and and EU rules and regulations are the sort who reckon they can make more profit at the other person's expense when they they don't have to play by the other person's rules.
In contrast the Germans, French etc. think there should be a level playing field.
Why do the doors in toilet cubicles in Ireland and the UK open inwards. In all civilized countries they open outwards.
When the door opens inwards you usually have to rub the bowl with your legs to get enough space to close the door. And if you have bags with you it becomes a major contortionist act.
Perhaps architects take an oath not to travel abroad in case they get contaminated with good ideas? Especially those that cost nothing to implement!
Why did David Cameron drop the idea that people should reduce their credit card debt?
Isn't that excellent advice?
Isn't that exactly what his Government is doing?
Isn't excessive debt the root cause of the world's current financial problems?
I can't help feeling that some vested interest (bankers?) stepped in to make the PM change his mind.
And why is everyone fixated on economic growth? Shouldn't we design our economic policies so that we all live comfortably with zero growth?
Why is it necessary for profits to be bigger year after year?
A society with a zero-growth economy would be a lot less damaging to the environment and would probably also be free of the pressures that regularly put thousands on the dole in the name of greater efficiency.
There is an expression "never waste a crisis". Isn't the present economic situation a glorious opportunity to wean the economy from its perpetual need for growth?
Greed seems to be an inevitable part of human nature - survival of the fittest. Even when the greediest people are those whose survival is least at risk.
Democracy takes the edge off that greed. Ancient lords took what they wanted and left the poorest to starve. Now the rich must at least make sure that enough of the rest of us have enough to keep us quiet so that they can get richer in peace.
Up to now we have elected representatives to Parliament with delegated authority to make decisions on our behalf because it would have been grossly impractical to hold referenda (referendums?) several times a month. Unfortunately too many elected representatives abuse their position for personal advantage. And allegiance to political parties takes precedence over the wishes of the people who elect them.
Voting to elect people to Parliament and Local Government should continue in the normal way because people need to have confidence in it.
However (even though politicans won't like it)technology is now good enough for many issues to be decided by electronic referenda instead of by Government. Every TV channel routinely holds nationwide votes to find the winners of trivial competitions. With only minor adjustments similar technology could be used for referenda on any number of issues.
I wonder how people would vote if Government allowed them to decide the top rate of tax for people earning over £300,000 a year or with over £3 million in assets? Or if they were allowed to decide the maximum bonus for bankers?
There is no techincal or economic reason why this can't be done. The only obstacle is the vested interests of those whose wealth and influence might be undermined.
I enjoy Private Eye. Most issues have one or two items that make me laugh out loud.
But at its heart Private Eye is about the dismal side of human nature. Story after story after story tells how people with wealth and/or influence feather their own or their "friends" nests.
There are many millionaires who would still be rich after giving away enough each year to support 10, 100 or 1000 families in comfort. Yet they call for the abolition of the 50% tax rate; complain about people on welfare and complain about EU laws that prevent them from making their staff work longer hours.
Greed seems to be an inevitable part of human nature - survival of the fittest.
Just as killing is the nature of lions.
How have we got ourselves into this pickle where a few get-rich-quick speculators buying or selling a currency, Government bonds or company shares can make nations shudder?
It is simply frightening to think that people who have no concern whatever for the consequences of their actions or the welfare of others can disrupt businesses and economies just to make themselves rich.
It is beyond comprehension why people who live in democracies allow this to happen. (It is easy to understand the anger of people in Greece)
How can a business or a country suddenly (like overnight or over a few weeks) go from being able to meet its commitments to being unable to do so?
Of course this sometimes happens when a delibierate attempt at fraud is found out - and a fraudster deserves what he gets.
But for the most part it occurs because some shyster, who has no role in the management of the business, thinks he can make a profit for himself by buying bonds or shares and selling them a few weeks later, or even a few seconds later. The money he pays for the shares never gets into the business as investment funds - it just circulates among shareholders with a bit being chipped of each time by the brokers. Then the said shyster gets worried that the shares he bought a few days ago might not appreciate in price quickly enough so he wants to sell them in a rush - or maybe he wants the cash to invest in something else. The net effect is that the other shysters see that cheap shares are available and they also become worried - so the share price tumbles and the whole world worries.
But none of this has been caused by, or has any impact on the business which is happily making and selling widgets just as it did several weeks ago before the shysters appeared on the scene.
EITHER the world stops getting in a panic when shysters do what shysters do
OR Governments (acting for the vast majority of voters) legislate to prevent shares, bonds etc from being sold within, say, 24 months from the date they were bought - so that the madness of short term speculation is stopped.
Of course the tiny tiny fraction of the population with a vested interest in the status quo will find all sorts of reasons why you can't interfere with the market like this. They are all well educated and very articulate - and very good at pulling strings behind the scenes.
But we could easily do it if we wanted to.
BBC's Countryfile was commenting on the low price farmers get for milk and how they need a huge dairy herd to make a profit. I think it said that farmers get 26p per litre for their milk and their total costs are about 28p. Not surprisingly a representative from a milk processing company blamed the low price paid by supermarkets. And, of course, the supermarkets say they are looking after their customers.
But would we really care if our milk cost 5p more per litre? Would we even notice?
There may well be grounds for a separate debate about the size of supermarket profits, but, in reality the cost of milk is irrelevant to them provided each supermarket chain is paying about the same as its competitors. If the cost price of milk went up by 5p a litre the supermarkets would just raise their retail price by 5p (or 6p). And the supermarkets don't care how much milk people buy. If milk sales go down they will just put another product in that shelf space.
So it seems most likely that the low profits farmers get from milk are their own fault for selling their milk too cheaply - each one down-bidding the next. I've never understood why they don't club together to create a selling power to match the supermarkets' buying power.
Who benefits from building enormous mechanized dairy farms? Not the cows, not the farmers and not the consumers of milk. The suppliers of the mechanization equipment and the bankers that finance it are the main beneficiaries. OK, for a time the mechanized farmer may benefit because he can sell his milk a fraction cheaper than his non-mechanized farmer neighbour. But in a short time the market, in the guise of an even bigger mechanized farmer, will squeeze the profit out of the smaller mechanized farmer also.
And if some smart-aleck suggests that a farmers' "cartel" would be illegal under competition law isn't it time to ask ourselves who that law was meant to protect? Do we want competition law to put farmers out of business?
Indeed what would be wrong with minimum prices for farm products just as we have a minimum price for labour!
One of those cookery guys on the radio a few days ago said something like "there are lots of spider crabs in the sea and we should be eating them"
Well ... why????
It's not right for us intelligent, and supposedly civilized, humans to eat wild creatures on a commercial scale.
I had the same thought when looking at the huge arrays of fish in the markets in Brixton.
I have no objection to a person feeding his family with fish that he catches himself (or herself). And I have no objection to eating the meat from farmed creatures. There are plenty of lakes and bays where fish could be farmed. Just as farming has increased the world population of cattle and sheep so it would with fish.
Leave all wild creatures to live their own lives and stop catching them on a commercial scale.
And don't say that we can't stop because we need to protect the livelihood of fishermen. It would be trivially easy for Governments to compensate fishermen if they wanted to. Look how easily they compensated bankers.
Membership of the United Nations should be conditional on "foreign" journalists (TV, radio and print media) having quasi-diplomatic status with the same journalistic freedoms that they enjoy in the country where they are accredited. That would make it pretty difficult for Governments to abuse their people in secret.
It may seem a bit unreasonable to faciliate all of the activities of tabloid journalists and paparazzi but the problem with trying to come up with a set of "United Nations" rules for journalism is that the liberal governments might be just as interested in applying restrictions which they would happily "blame" on the UN - "We'd love to be more open, but we are not allowed".
The recent revelations about Andrew Marr shows that even journalists are not above a bit of secrecy when they can get away with it.
We are obsessed with efficiency and saving time. "Hurry up", "Don't waste time".
We have vacuum cleaners instead of brooms, cars instead of bicycles, computers instead of slide rules, faster computers, faster trains, faster broadband ...
Why?
Long long ago we spent all our time meeting our needs for survival - just like wild birds and animals still do.
Now we can meet our needs for survival with a small fraction of our time - as far as I can see agriculture comprises about 1% of the UK economy.
If we have 99% of our time free from essentials - or even 89% - why do we need to save even more time?
What are we saving time for? What do we do with the time we save? For some strange reason we save time so we can do more, not less!
The reality is that we spend our "saved" time making and doing things so we can buy stuff that other people are making and doing in their "saved" time so they can buy the stuff we make and do.
The only part of the system that actually matters is the small bit that provides the essentials.
We hope that the people who provide the essentials continue to want the unnnecessary stuff that the rest of us make and do. Because if ever the providers of the essentials decided they didn't need to buy any more of our stuff (new cars, new tractors, new phones, new computers, new films, new music, new loans) and therefore did not need to produce and sell their stuff (food and drink) the rest of us would starve.
The Government is proposing to prevent retailers having cigarettes on display in shops as a further step to reduce the number of people who smoke.
Why not remove all profit from the retailing of cigarettes by requiring retailers to sell them for the same price as they buy them?
In the meantime shouldn't retailers voluntarily donate all proceeds from the sale of tobacco products to charity rather than profit from such a harmful product.
Maybe there could be a voluntary window sticker "We give all tobacco profits to charity". I would prefer to use that sort of shop.
I have complained in the past about the efficiency with which the Civil Service manages to place square pegs in round holes.
Everyone would benefit if only some attempt was made to put people to work at tasks that matched their skills and inclinations. The taxpayer would see more and better work done with his hard-earned dosh and the staff would feel more valued.
On the other hand ...
There's a strong case for limiting or preventing some people from doing the things they like because they do more of them than is good for us.
The high achievers of this world are high achievers because they persuade the rest of us to allow them to do what they like.
The high achievers of this world are high achievers because they do something they like and they persuade the rest of us to let them do an awful lot of it.
Hence we have too many cars; too many bathrooms; too many TVs; too-expensive health care; too much private and Government debt and excessive bank bonuses; rapid depletion of the world's natural resources and global warming etc, etc.
For example. I quite like Professor Brian Cox's TV programs and I admire his knowledge of his subject and his ability to explain it to the layman. But if he had his way we would spend £billions or £trillions going to Mars and other planets. What for? Wouldn't we be better off if we saved the money and treated ourselves to an extra day off work?
When I look around at all of the unnecessary things we have (which we call progress) I wonder can we never say to the high achievers "Stop, we already have enough thank you."
I reckon that women (and men) are now tied to their office desks with much shorter chains than those that were alleged to tie their mothers or grandmothers to the kitchen sink. And the shortest chains are attached to those whose employers expect them always to be available by mobile phone.
What's the difference between working at the kitchen sink or working in an office to pay for the washing machine and dishwasher?
Women's lib may have intended to redress the balance between the opportunities open to men and women. But all it has achieved is to leave vast swathes of cities towns and villages empty of men, women and children during the day with the consequent loss of the local community that, in times past, provided security and "family values" in neighbourhoods.
Long ago when paid work commonly required physical effort it was probably reasonable to expect men to do it. But once the nature of work changed there was no reason why it should remain a male prerogative and a young mother ought to expect a fair choice to be made as to whether she, or her partner would be the wage earner. Unfortunately there has been no change in the assumption that men go out to work. Its just that women now go to work as well.
And all for the benefit of the manufacturers and retailers of all the "essential" material goods that your grandparents lived without quite happily - fitted kitchens, TV in every room, dishwashers, fitted carpets, hardwood floors, two cars, exotic baby buggies, dresses, shoes etc etc etc.
The present turmoil in Egypt reminds me yet again that the core value of democracy is not that we can choose our politicians at election time, but that they go away quietly when their term of office expires or they lose the confidence of their people.
A lot of the stuff in this blogg is prompted by a sense that we don't take sufficient account of our animal instincts, the effect of our genes, when examining or explaining human baehaviour.
For example. "Horizon" on BBC last Monday night, 24 Jan, wondered why so many people don't accept the scientific consensus that global warming is a real and man-made phenomenen, and what is the role of the media in this.
The main message that I got from the program was how far scientists seem to be disconnected from the reality of human behaviour.
The challenge for scientists is not to convince people that global warming is real. It is to convince people that it is worth a considerable personal cost to do something about it - the sort of cost that they were not prepared to bear, for example, to support the UK textile, coal or car industries or even their local shop.
And when people don't want to do something that they "ought" to do, the usual reaction is to create a justification for their behaviour. In this case they can justify inaction by questioning the science. We can see this all around us. Trades Unions argue that safety will be compromised because it is more acceptable than demanding more pay. Employers claim the need to keep wages down and working hours up to be competitive when they really want an excuse for even more profit.
I'm sure the majority of scientists genuinely believe that global warming will lead to a crisis and believe we should all be helping to do something about it. But surely this expectation flies in the face of experience.
Like every other species humans have always been delighted to rape the planet for their personal betterment without regard for the future. Unfortunately, because humans have intelligence, they are better at it than the other species. If we didn't want everything "now" there would be no basis for the banking industry. We see all around us that people (including, I suspect, the scientists when they are not being scientists) are only interested in buying whatever is cheapest even if it means the loss of UK jobs, the loss of their local shop, or the devastation of other species.
The Horizon program wondered why so many people are unwilling to accept the consensus on global warming even though each of them would be quite happy to accept the medical consensus about how to treat his/her serious illness. I can't understand why the program makers used this example. To my mind it just illustrates the enormous difference between people's attitudes to things that have an immediate impact on their welfare and other things that are distant and intangible.
So HOW can supposedly intelligent scientists expect people to have any interest in paying now to solve a problem that will impact on future generations, probably in far-off places?
As far as I know scientists are not saying that global warming will destroy planet earth or wipe out the human species. Even if the public was convinced that global warming will cause a few wars or famines I suspect most people would be content to believe it will all affect someone else.
And finally ... the program made no attempt to consider whether all this scientific consensus is, as much as anything, driven by the genes of scientists who want secure employment and to have their work admired by their peers - just like ordinary people. This is an unusual subject for scientists. Because of its political implications it is not the same as trying to develop a new type of semi-conductor or a better way to carry out surgery. In "normal" science there is no merit in being on either side of the debate - it is just science. Also "normal" science is usually done with much smaller scientific teams. Anyone pushing a substantially different hypothesis is, in effect, challenging the reputations of a very large group of experts.
Cars eat money, they really do!
First there is the cost of buying one ... all of the marketing is aimed at getting you to buy one that costs a bit more than you really planned to spend ...
Then its resale value drops ... like a stone ...
And you have to tax and insure it ...
That's all before you actually even get it home.
Well there's not much point having a car and not going anywhere
So you spend money on fuel ...
And parking ...
And there is not much point going anywhere without doing something when you get there
So you buy something that you would not have bothered with if you did not have a car to make it easy to bring home ...
And it was a long trip so you stop at a restaurant and spend ten times what it would have cost to eat better at home ...
All because you have a car
The Economist (Jan 15) discusses China buying up Europe and the relative sizes and strengths of the Chinese and European economies.
I understand the general economic idea that importing and exporting can increase economic output compared to a closed economy. But it seems to me that is just a mathematical analysis and it doesn't take account of social issues such as personal welfare, regulation and control.
There seems to be a great danger of losing control to forces (economic or military) beyond the power of our own Governments.
It would be nice if the world were a single large "country" with no "tribal" divisions. But people are not like that, they seem to be most comfortable in groups and with insiders and outsiders. The upper size of these groups is relatively small - even the UK seems to be a bit too large if the wishes of Scotland and Wales to seceed are an indication.
And There are plenty of historical examples of where people have been drawn to commit atrocities on outsiders. It would be unwise to imagine those tendencies have been obliterated, or even diminished.
It would also be nice if everyone was content with his or her proportionate share of wealth or well being. But people are not like that either. Most of what we call progress has been achieved at the behest of individuals who wanted more for themselves - whether to profit from an invention, from the admiration of their scientific peers or simply to get rich from the labour of others.
Because greedy tendencies are such a normal part of human make-up it is essential to be able to regulate - otherwise society will degenerate into anarchy or opression. The recent upheaval in Tunisia is an example.
While it might not make much sense for small countries to erect economic walls (I am a strong supporter of the EU at its present size) I am not sure that there is a net long term benefit from unfettered multi-continental trade. Of course we have all enjoyed the benefit of cheap Asian goods such as computers (including the one I am using to write this) and electric tools. But would we really be worse off in the widest sense if we had not had access to them. What would be wrong with those goods being manufactured in Europe (or in USA for americans)? And would we really be worse off overall if the Chinese did not buy Rolls-Royce cars?
As we embrace multi-continental trade on the grand scale we automatically create even greater opportunities for the greedy to get even richer. And more importantly we lose regulatory control of their activities. They can claim to be operating under more favourable rules elsewhere. They will claim that our rules must be relaxed to compete with other countries. Or they will threaten to take themselves to a more favourable regime. Companies cannot be allowed to become so powerful that they can threaten a State.
The obvious recent example is the banking crisis. We allowed banks to become so big that we could not afford for them to fail. And now the people who caused the problems are again getting Lotto-sized bonuses instead of being left penniless as a punishment for their rash business decisions. And because we have created (or permitted) a multi-continental banking system we are now afraid to set down strict requirements to lend to small businesses or to limit bonuses. If European banking was confined to Europe (or British banking to Britain for the Europhobes) we would could regulate them effecively a tapayers and voters would want. And to argue against this simply because so much international banking is managed in London is, surely, the tail wagging the dog.
To return to China and Europe. At what point does China own so much of Europe that it becomes China? Look how Cadburys seems to be disappearing under the ownership of Kraft.
Many of the ways we behave don't seem make a lot of sense.
Hence "Hold on a moment ... lets think a bit more about that".
For example ...
Are we really better off than our ancestors 400 years ago? Yes we have more stuff including shinier hospitals. But better off is not about where we stand on the ladder of technology. Its whether we are content with our lives, or whether we are always worried about tomorrow - stuggling to get more or hoping to escape some disaster. From that point of view I doubt if the human condition has changed in 10 thousand years - and doing our best to consume all the resources of the planet as quickly as possible won't make any difference.
Why does anyone need to have a car costing £50,000 – especially as they consume even more fuel than cars costing a third of the price?
Why do we allow cars with engines more powerful than, say, 35hp If people are really concerned about the environment and road crash deaths and injuries?
Why is it necessary for shares and such to be bought and sold in milliseconds? What interest in or control over a company can you have in such a short time?
Why is it necessary to extract minerals in the Arctic? Why not leave them in case our great great ... grandchildren in 500 years time might have use for them?
